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Failure to delete hate speech could cost Facebook, Google billions in France
Lawmakers in France this week passed a controversial new law that could impose billions in fines on social media companies that fail to delete certain kinds of content quickly enough—within an hour, in some cases.
The new legislation (page in French) gives online platforms 24 hours from notification to remove certain kinds of content or else face fines.
Content subject to enforcement under the law includes: sexual harassment; child pornography; anything that promotes certain crimes; anything that promotes discrimination, hate, or violence; anything that denies crimes against humanity; and promotion of terrorism. The window for removing content related to child pornography or terrorism is shorter, only one hour.
A company that fails to remove such content within the correct time limit after being notified of it can be fined €1.25 million ($1.35 million). If a regulatory board finds a company is not meeting its obligations, it can impose a maximum fine equal to 4 percent of that company's annual global revenue.
The BBC notes:
Digital rights group La Quadrature du Net said the requirement to take down content that the police considered "terrorism" in just one hour was impractical.
"Except the big companies, nobody can afford to have a 24/7 watch to remove the content when requested," a spokesman for the group said. "Hence, they will have to rely on censorship before receiving a request from the police."
That might be in the form of using an automatic system provided by the largest companies, giving them "more power on what can exist on the web or not".
But there are also fears that such tech could be used against groups such as protesters.
"Since 2015, we already had such a law that allowed the police to ask for the removal of some content if they deemed it to be terrorist... this has been used multiple times in France to censor political content," the spokesman said.
"Giving the police such a power, without any control... is obviously for us an infringement on the freedom of speech."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @01:59PM (1 child)
But then they opened business offices in the EU to reap some Euros or hire their people or build a data center, and they became subject to their laws. If free speech was so important to them, they could close their foreign offices and exist under US law. I don't think the EU will cut themselves off the US Internet.
Unlike the US, the EU members don't have the pull to get execs extradited. People have been prosecuted and jailed in the EU for what they published in the US, but they weren't captains of industry and they travelled themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2020, @09:07AM
EU population - 514.40 Million
US population - 328.2 million
Guess were are the most eyeballs for ads?